Published by Douglas Messerli, the World Cinema Review features full-length reviews on film from the beginning of the industry to the present day, but the primary focus is on films of intelligence and cinematic quality, with an eye to exposing its readers to the best works in international film history.

Saturday, December 27, 2014

Rob Marshall | Into the Woods

James
Lapine (book) and Stephen Sondheim (music and lyrics) Into the Woods / Beverly Hills, California, the Wallis Annenberg
Center for the Performing Arts presenting The Oregon Shakespeare Festival
Production, December 20, 2014

James
Lapine (screenplay, based on his libretto), Stephen Sondheim (music and
lyrics), Rob Marshall (director) Into
the Woods / 2014

It
seems strange, given my long admiration for and knowledge of American musical
theater, that I had not seen Lapine and Sondheim’s successful musical Into the Woods previously. I missed its
original Old Globe Theatre production in San Diego, shortly we after we moved
to the West Coast (we were busily attending almost nightly dinners and events
in Los Angeles during 1986), and for some explicable reason failed to see it in
the late 1980s when it appeared on Broadway. Even more inexplicable was our
failure to see it in 2002 when it was revived at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los
Angeles and subsequently in New York.

But the coincidence of seeing a production
just a week before watching it on the large screen in the film rendition, more
than made up for my previous lack of attention to it. Of course I had heard
Bernadette Peters’ rendition of “Children Will Listen” many times, and I knew
that the work involved a twisted telling of several different Grimm Brothers’
fairytales. But I had remained in the dark, fortunately, about the convoluted
plot-line.

All was finally revealed to Howard and me
in a resplendent, if slightly trimmed-down version by The Oregon Shakespeare
Festival, who were asked to repeat their engagingly skeletal production for the
second season of the Beverly Hills Wallis Annenberg’s events.

This was not truly a “perfect”
production—indeed given the work’s convoluted story and its self-consciously
witty lyrics and patter, along with its bullet-quick pace, one wonders whether
there could ever me a thoroughly resolved performance—but it was certainly an
excellent example of what musical theater creativity is all about. If it was
difficult, at times, to make out all the lyrics (which reminded me a bit of my endlessly-rhymed
couplets in my own short musical attempts), we, along with the general
audience, were certainly moved by the blithe performances and more affected by
the many deeper subtleties of the Lapine-Sondheim telling.

For these authors the woods was not just
a slightly strange world in which frightening events often take place (Little
Red Riding Hood’s descent in the stomach of a wolf, Jack’s amazing ascent into
a world of giants, and Rapunzel’s torturous relationships with those whom she
allowed to climb her hair up to her open window) but, in Lapine’s version, is
alocale through which Cinderella runs
on her way home from the ball, and in which the Baker and his Wife, determined
to break the spell of their barren relationship, seek out the trophies—a white
cow, a red cape, a golden shoe, and corn-white locks—that will break the witch’s
evil spell. It is a world where everyday life can be reconsidered, reality
perceived in different dimensions, love and adventure explored, an rejuvenation
attained. In songs such as “I Know Things Now” (sung by Little Red Ridng Hood),
“Giants in the Sky” (by Jack), “Agony” (by the two princes), “It Takes Two” (by
the Baker and His Wife), and “Moments in the Woods” (by the Baker’s Wife), the
characters tell us what they have discovered and learned from their incredible “time
out” in nature.

Yet
the goal of nearly all of these figures is somehow, after their glorious new
perceptions, to return to normalcy, to get “out of the woods” and return home
to everyday life as quickly as possible. If the woods, as Little Red Riding Hood
perceives is a world that makes her feel “excited and scared,” a world where
the Baker suddenly discovers the need for communal action, and his brave Wife delights
in the special sexual “moments” the woods have to offer, nonetheless, the
forest is a dangerous place to which they do not wish to return, but are forced
to in the second act by the giants—immense forces that control their of their
lives and are fully capable of destroying them. Indeed, the great power of
Lapine and Sondheim’s musical fable, unlike the Disneyfied world in which
anyone of my age grew up, is that even in the imagination of children (and
definitely in the child-like imaginations of peasants) evil happens: mothers
are murdered, princes are discovered to be insincere, children are recognized
as greedy and demanding appendages, witches are vain and selfish, and even the
most ordinary group of citizens can suddenly turn upon each other with
accusations. As LA Weekly film critic
Alan Scherstuhl nicely summarizes it:

No matter how it performs
in theaters, Stephen Sondheim’s and

James Lapine’s dark, glorious
and supremely messy fairytale

mash-up musical/therapy
session is now forever a pop-culture

curio unwary kids will stumble
upon, to their bafflement and

betterment. The
princess-party punch-bowl has forever been

spiked.

The Annenberg production rambled and
gamboled through and around the forest with hardly any sets, creating an
enormous amount of locational atmosphere simply with lights and costumes.
Fortunately nearly all the performers could act and, most importantly in this
musical, could sing. Of my many favorite moments, I’d be derelict not to
mention Kjerstine Rose Anderson’s touching wake-up call “I Know Things Now,”
Jeremy Peter Johnson’s and Royer Backus’s poignant paean to emotional suffering
“Agony,” Rachael Warren’s troubling either/or consideration “Moments in the
Woods,” and, of course, the musical’s inevitable show-stopper, “Last Midnight,”
sung with nightclub zest by Miriam A. Laube. But everyone in this production
succeed well in taking the audience through the dark gnarls of woodland and out
again into the safety of Sondheim’s conforming vision of reality, where parents
are warned about the stories and words they tell to their children—including,
presumably, the tale we’ve just experienced.

Given all the dark elements of this work
and its complexity of plot I winced at the idea of Rob Marshall’s upcoming film
rendition. I’d seen his nervously–hyperventilated version of Chicago and his disastrously over-the-top
retelling of Nine, and I got scared, very scared of what he might do to
Lapine’s and Sondheim’s gem. And then, there was the even-more frightening specter
of the film’s producer, the Disney studios! As Howard expressed it, at best we
might see the tamed-down version that Lapine and Sondheim had approved for
high-school productions.

What a surprise, accordingly, to find a
nearly intact and, in many ways, superior-to-the-play movie in a nearby
theater. Sondheim musicals generally dispense with dance (one of Marshall’s
downfalls in Chicago), and,
accordingly, he could concentrate this time in bringing a story that suffers on
the stage as characters go rushing in and off into the theater wings. With
movie-camera mobility, Marhsall maneuvers his characters in tête-à-tête-like
encounters as the neighbors go scurrying through the forest. Some critics have
understandably criticized this approach as isolating the musical’s increasingly
socialized figures, and certainly this does have an effect on the second act
when the quartet of survivors are forced to work together in order to rid their
world of a female giant; but Marshall’s clearer delineation of the character
encounters with one another also help to make Lapine’s tale clearer, and brings
greater focus upon each one of these fairytale figure’s psychological desires
and failures.

To devotees of this musical, which even
after just having seen it, I had already become, it is always disappointing, moreover,
to find that some of the songs of missing, including reprises such as the two
Princes’ mocking love-stricken duo, “Agony.” And I agree with some observers
that cutting important songs such as “No More,” in which the Mysterious Man (the
Baker’s long-dead father), sympathizing with the Baker’s determination to
escape from the wood (with lovely admissions such as “We disappoint, / We leave
a mess, / We die but we don’t”) makes the Baker’s decision to return to his
friends and new family somewhat inexplicable. But one has simply to expect
those treasured absences given the genre of cinema musicals.

I was less able to forgive the sanitizing of
the Baker’s Wife’s tryst with the Prince in the forest. The Disney film leaves
us with the impression that the “dangers” she has discovered which bring her to suddenly comprehend it’s
time to leave the woods has consisted of only a few kisses, instead of, as the
play demonstrates, a full-out, old-fashioned fuck. And accordingly, her
wondrous song after (excellently realized by Emily Blunt) does not make a lot
of sense.

But, again, if that minor concession
allowed the rest of the film to remain intact, I can live with it. The
performances (made more important in the close-up attention of the camera) and
singing were uniformly excellent. As the wolf, Johnny Depp was wily, suave, and
lascivious in just the right amounts. Okay, his witty lines (“Think of that
scrumptious carnality / Twice in one day…/ There’s no possible way / To
describe what you feel / When you’re talking to your meal.”) didn’t get the
giggles it surely did on Broadway. I’d still argue they were well sung. And the
movie did even better with songs that got somewhat lost in the busy run-arounds
of the stage. By slowing down and focusing on Anna Kendrik’s (as Cindrella) perplexing
contradictory desires to run and remain in “On the Steps of the Palace,” we
suddenly were able to comprehend and enjoy that lovely ballad. The young Daniel
Huttlestone (as Jack) truly made us feel that there were suddenly “Giants in
the Sky.” The handsome, self-preening
princes (Chris Pine and Billy Magnussen) capably sang of their agonies while
sporting about in a waterfall. And Rapunzel (Mackenzie Mauzy) tossed out her
golden chords along with her flaxen hair quite glowingly.

My only criticism of the star of the show, Meryl
Streep as the Witch (an actress about whom, I admit, I have often sounded like
an old curmudgeon), was that she played her part, even when singing, just a bit
too well: in her gently sung “Stay with Me,” Streep growled out some darker
tones in a manner that Bernadette Peters might never have imagined. I wanted to
more clearly hear Streep’s expressive coloratura, which has been denied us far
too long—except for a few quick ditties in Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion and some saccharine standards in Phyllida
Lloyd’s Mamma Mia!. But Streep made
up for it with a full-throttle rendition of “Last Midnight” and an offstage,
show-worthy voicing of “Children Will Listen.” Like Dickens’ Oliver, I simply
wanted “some more.”

Sure, the movie version of Into the Woods was not perfect…but as I
said above I can’t imagine any production of the musical-comedy equivalent of King Lear to ever be everything it
aspires to. There’s way too many fascinating characters, too many plot
possibilities, and far too many cleverly rhymed couplings to allow any
directorial vision to get just right. That Marshall achieved so much perfection
is a kind of miracle in itself. His Into
the Woods might, in the end, be one of the best of musical movies—and I’ve
seen most of them—on record.